


Shazam

by Crowsister



Series: Blüdhaven Blues [1]
Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Tabletop Gaming, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-24 07:13:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13806132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crowsister/pseuds/Crowsister
Summary: Tabletop character introduction piece. Raimonda Soliani was just a secretary, taking things one day at a time to survive. Her dreams had been thoroughly crushed years ago, not a single ambitious bone in her body. However, one strange Halloween party later and she has to figure out how to live with some...new developments.





	Shazam

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SuperKamiGodEspurrOfMan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SuperKamiGodEspurrOfMan/gifts).



> Some context: this is an intro piece I wrote for a tabletop I'm playing in. The setting is set in the DC Universe, but it's been liberally shifted and changed for the tabletop game I previously mentioned. The powers for characters are randomly generated by the GM, my sister -- all I supplied is that I wanted a magic origin for my powers and that Raimonda got her powers from a Halloween party and encountering strange Ancient Greek text on the walls of a room. Via sheer coincidence and RNG, Raimonda got saddled with Shazam powers. Billy Batson is some 15 years from being born, currently, in setting of the tabletop and Raimonda's narrative.
> 
> Other than all of that, Raimonda and I have no idea what's going on. That's for my sister and the Wizard to know and for us to find out. I wrote this piece as a way to get into Raimonda's head before the first session and I'm posting it here for giggles. You might recognize Raimonda's last name from Low-Key: that's because Raimonda is Theo's aunt (Theo's dad has a twin sister). Whether Raimonda makes an appearance in Low-Key is up in the air right now, but she might make an appearance in that in the future and possibly the silly fic I've been toying with in my head.

####  **Blüdhaven, NJ** **  
****October 31, 1985**

Raimonda Soliani was a simple person. She worked 9-5, like the Dolly Parton song, everyday, Monday through Friday as a secretary. Taking notes down and organizing things for someone who didn’t care to do it themselves. She got weekends off normally, but she was getting tomorrow off as well for being her boss’s date to a work Halloween party.

She was starting to question whether a free Friday was worth it.

“Raimonda, can you go to the bathroom?” Her boss asked. “Your makeup is running.” Raimonda mentally added what her experience with him told him he also meant: _“I want to look good and you being a slob isn’t going to cut it.”_

“Thank you for letting me know,” she muttered, “maybe while I’m gone, you can get them to open a window or turn on the air conditioner because it’s sweltering in here.”

He hummed, rubbing his beard and she counted to ten in her head before turning on her heel. She followed down the hall, remembering the host’s instructions to where the bathroom was. Rai opened the door, the one she remembered at any rate, to be the one with the bathroom in it.

It was a bathroom, thankfully. No awkward privacy invasion moment, then. Excellent. She walked in, closing the door with a soft sigh.

“You just had to be a good person,” she muttered. She glared at herself in the mirror, but the glare fell apart. “Who am I kidding? I would’ve helped out even if he didn’t bribe me.”

Rai rolled her shoulders back, adjusting her shirt back into its proper place. She imagined armor over herself, letting the image of a knight’s armor superimpose itself over her in the mirror in her head. Make herself feel safe by pretending to be a knight, even if it was only for a few silly seconds. She exhaled slowly, feeling herself calm down.

“Raimonda Soliani, everyday hero whose fatal flaw is helping people,” she muttered, smiling as she teased herself. She fixed her makeup, taking a step back from the mirror to make sure she got all the angles right on it. Her shoulders brushed the wall and her vision went gold.

Slowly, all over the walls in brilliant yellow were sharp, foreign letters that made her think of a college campus and math class. Over and over again, sigmas and etas and alphas and Greek letters she didn’t even begin to recognize. Rai’s head pounded with the letters’ pulsing and she began to hyperventilate as the letters shifted to something more recognizable right before her eyes. All over the walls, in large and loud capital letters, was the word “SHAZAM” over and over and over again, drowning out the bathroom’s decor and colors into gold.

“Shazam?” She exhaled under her breath, breath stolen from her in the sheer panic.

There was a loud _CRACK_ and her vision went white. Her whole body felt like it was submerged in static electricity, only more and more and more and more until her nerves gave up trying to figure out what the feeling was and only gave her a sheer feeling of “THIS HURTS”. Raimonda prayed to every one of her fathers’ saints, but their names bled out of her mind onto to be replaced with the chanting of Shazam again and again.

Color flushed into her vision suddenly and Rai recognized the bathroom around her, now shifted slightly as if a strong wind blew through. The hand towels were on the floor, lightly charred. The wall behind her felt cracked, she turned and saw the wallpaper peeling in silhouette around where she had been standing. The mirror was off balance and almost precariously to a point where she was certain it would fall. She reached out, gently adjusting it back, but in doing so she finally could see herself.

Gone was her long, brown hair, replaced with shockingly white hair that was in a short style she remembered seeing in a magazine as a child, only to be told her hair was too curly and wavy to wear it like that. Her face was surreal: there were parts where she could recognize it as her face, like her brown eyes and a well-faded scar on her chin, but everywhere else looked like she was carved like an idealized marble statue. Gone was her nose, with its attempts to restructure itself from being broken seven times as a child. In its place was a nose off of a statue from a Gotham museum, made by a Renaissance sculptor thousands of years ago, complete with Byronic sharpness in the tip of her nose complete with a Keats warmth in the curves of her nostrils. She looked like the pictures of Diana Prince, of Wonder Woman. Gone was the Princess costume her boss had rented for her. She wore red leather armor, the soft shifting of chainmail underneath as she inhaled and exhaled quickly to supply her shuddering heart with air. A silver, knightley paldron sat on her left shoulder, highlighted in the bathroom’s cheap lighting in gold that matched the gauntlets on her hands. On her chest sat a white lightning bolt, bold as you please and winking at her in its highlight of gold. A matching white cape draped across her shoulders, starting from under her new pauldron and ending at her mid thigh.

Raimonda exhaled, running a hand through her hair, “Well...this is a better costume than the one Richards got me.” She flinched as she got a bit of it caught in her metal gauntlet, working it out of her hair. She jumped, hearing footsteps. She opened the window, moving out of it and going down the roof of the garage and into the nearby alleyway. She took a deep breath, closing her eyes. “Shazam?” she muttered. The flush of power hit her again, her brain processing it faster this time, and she opened her eyes. She looked down, seeing the pink princess dress again. She closed her eyes, inhaling deeply before exhaling. “Okay. Freak out later. When people won’t think you’re missing from a freak, local hurricane,” she muttered, rolling her shoulders back.

She went back into the party, letting her exhaustion at being so social color her behavior so she could try to be convincing about why the bathroom had charred towels. When the twins – the McCullochs – were blamed for the towels (they had a history of pranks with bad punchlines), Raimonda promised herself that she was going to leave them a bag of candy on their desks.

* * *

The following day, she spent freaking out. She managed to lie her way back to the house where the party took place and looked at the bathroom. The bathroom itself seemed innocent. A normal bathroom, regardless of the fact that the wallpaper had a different pattern (a lack of lightning bolts, she realized. The shape was now starting to irritate her), just sitting there being a bathroom. Rai didn’t know what to think of it. If it hadn’t been for the appearances of Wonder Woman, the Green Commie (as radio liked to call him), and the Flash, she would’ve thought she was going crazy.

But there was a woman who possibly was alive and in fighting condition back in World War 1 and World War 2, fighting the good fight.

There was a man with bright green _things_ that could stop missiles.

There was a man who supposedly run across his city in the time it took a person to blink.

So, Rai told herself, all things considered, her situation wasn’t _that_ odd. Just...odd. She could turn into a supermodel with armor. So what? It wasn’t like she could shoot lasers from her eyes or turn into a dinosaur. She was a small fry in terms of recent weirdness in the world. She could probably live without ever again having to say the word “Shazam”. When the hell would she ever use that in conversation anyway?

Her resolve to not transform again broke on Sunday. She snuck around, coming to an abandoned, sad beach and inhaling slowly. She muttered, “Shazam.”

The energy flowed through her, this time leaving her aware of the fact that there was a large CRACK of noise when this did happen. She looked up to see a quickly dissipating thundercloud.

“Okay,” Rai muttered, “okay. Good to know.” She rolled her shoulders back, touching the pauldron and gauntlets. Solid, not an illusion of armor, but actual _armor_ . She could remove the gauntlets, but not the pauldron. She ran a gauntlet-less hand through her hair, finding it impressively _soft_.

She also found that her fingers were licking with visible _electricity_ when she saw her hand again. She yelped, waving her hand. A white crack of small lightning flew away from her hand and hit a seagull. It squawked and fell over onto the sand.

“Shit!” She ran over, checking the seagull’s pulse. Rai gave a sigh of relief, feeling a little pulse of life in the seagull. “Okay, bitchin’, not dead,” she muttered. She sat back on the sand, looking at her hand. “How do I do that on _purpose_ so I can make sure I _don’t_ kill things?”

* * *

####  **Blüdhaven, NJ** **  
** **November 14th, 1985**

“Okay,” she exhaled. “Okay. From the top.”

Raimonda Soliani had always been precocious. At age 6, she had witnessed her Nonno Gregorio beat her Uncle Victor in chess and had become her neighborhood master at it by age 7. When she finally found a boxing teacher willing to teach her for some of her allowance when she was 12, she had tackled the art of it to the point where her teacher called her a mini-wildcat in the making.  When she had been mysteriously gifted what she could only call superpowers, Raimonda had set herself to learning them as best she could in what time she had.

A routine quickly settled. She’d leave work at 5, go to her apartment and change into workout clothes, then set about doing a jog around town. When she found a place she could dub as safely abandoned, she’d Shazam up and practice.

Something in her, something connected to the lightning she could arc across her hands, told her this was the beginning. There was _more_ to be had, whatever that _more_ was. Maybe it was connected by how doing everything in this form was just a little bit easier. Running, going through her boxing exercises, going through her Nova Scrimia stances, remembering bits of information, it all came a bit _easier._

Today, she was going through her exercises, observing her body and the changes being Shazam-ed brought. One-armed push-ups were something she did if she felt like pushing herself harder, in her normal body. Shazam-ed, she did them as a way to focus a little better and think a little better.

“What do we do now?” she asked under her breath as she exhaled. “We’ve got this. What do we _do_ with it?”

Raimonda jumped, hearing a scream. She popped up onto her feet, following the scream, heart pounding...until she found a little girl screaming in dismay up at her cat in a tree.

“Sh, sh, sh,” Raimonda replied, looking around. “That isn’t the kind of attention you wanna bring-”

“But Socks is up in a tree and I-I don’t know what to do!” The little girl was wringing her hands, making her little knuckles white as she squeezed her hands.

Raimonda looked around, hoping to God that there was no bad intentioned adult coming. “Tell ya what,” Raimonda replied, “I’ll get Socks out of the tree, then you two go home, okay?”

The little girl sniffled and nodded. Raimonda cracked her knuckles, slowly approaching the tree. She wouldn’t need lightning for this: just a bit of her body’s natural ease. She slowly climbed the tree, humming softly. She reached the black cat, spotting it easily by its white paws. The gauntlet came in handy as Raimonda scooped up the cat, the cat clawing at her as she held it and dropped down.

“You got him out!” The little girl ran forward, pigtails bouncing up and down as she got closer.

Raimonda smiled, holding the cat out for the girl. Socks prefered his master’s hands to her gauntlet, practically jumping over to the little girl’s hands. “Now, head on home, okay? Straight home,” Raimonda said to the girl. “I’ll know if you don’t.”

The little girl eyed her skeptically before giving a clinical nod. “I guess I can believe that. You’re red, like Santa, so that means you see everything, right?”

“Sure,” Raimonda said. “That’s exactly what the red stands for.”

Raimonda watched the girl head home, satisfaction purring in her like a happy cat as she pondered the idea of using these powers to help people.


End file.
